Frontend Development at BitTorrent

Project Summary
I worked for BitTorrent Inc, the company behind the BitTorrent protocol as well as products like uTorrent, BitTorrent and BitTorrent Sync, from Sept 2013 to Sept 2014. My main role was a front end developer for the BitTorrent Bundles initiative, a platform for artists and indie producers to publish their content and get a larger fanbase by distributing through the 180m+ users that use BitTorrent.

Technologies UsedJavaScript was the main programming language I used. I used Webstorm as my main IDE.NodeJS was used in our backend, along with a lot of open source Github libraries. We used Heroku as our server, along with various other addons such as MongoDB and Redis for our DB and cache.
We used Github to maintain a source code depository and also for continuous integration purposes. Travis and SauceLabs was used for builds and testing.
One of the best things about working at BitTorrent was the ability to use a large amount of third party libraries quite freely, especially since we were using an all JS-stack. We used jQuery of course, along with Backbone for structure, Bootstrap for a styling base, Handlebars for templating, Stylus for CSS, GruntJS, Bower, MomentJS, Q Promises, Lodash, and lots of other third party libraries.

Responsibilities/Roles
My responsibilities were several:
-Fix new and existing bugs related to the BitTorrent Bundles website
-Improve experience of BitTorrent Bundles websites
-Help implement new look and feel from UX
-Help implement payment system for paid bundles
-Integrate emailing system for sending out emails

Most notable/challenging project
My biggest project at BitTorrent was making the first official paid Torrent available. Since BitTorrent Bundles was about giving artists the choice to use free and/or paid bundles, this was a big deal. It was also my first payment experience. Me and my coworkers used Stripe a great deal for credit card payments, as well as the Paypal REST API for paypal integration. Open Exchange Rates API helped alot for currency conversion. SendGrid was used for email confirmations. I am proud to have helped release the first paid bundle/torrent ever, Thom Yorke (of Radiohead)’s album Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes in Sept 2014.

Screenshots

Thom Yorke’s album on BitTorrent!Users can preview the free part of the albumThe payment form including ability to change currency + pay with paypal